tater

I'll see if I can dig them up. I've pushed for a randomized solar system with "fog of war" for a while so that "science" instead of being points, gains the player data needed to design and complete missions. I.e.: learn about an atmosphere so that you know what kind of descent vehicle is required, etc. BTW, instead of fully "procedural" worlds, the game could just as well have a library of vetted, hand-made worlds to chose from, and grab a certain number to create variant solar systems. In addition, it could scale the planets and distances between them so that you might see Duna again, but it could be anything from 1:1 with stock Duna, to 6x larger. The code to place worlds might include certain flags so it's not fully random (no ice worlds in close solar orbits, etc).

I think I didn't make myself clear. I was merely looking for a lower-limit boundary value for crossing time. I suppose the cheapest (dv wise) real mission would likely be just killing solar orbital velocity around the galactic center (~200-250 km/s), then letting the stars rotate around it as it half-crosses in its highly eccentric orbit around the core. I was really just putting a lower limit on physically crossing the galaxy. Rama refers to a book by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.

Many ww2 aircraft took off from grass strips. Those strips were none the less prepared, they were not random fields. Even in the early days of flight where barnstormers would land on farms... those areas had been cleared. Where I live in NM looks flat, but if you tried to land even a small prop plane in most areas, the wheels would certainly hit a hole or deep, soft dust and break the gear off. Would the Space Shuttle be able to land on a random flat spot on earth? A few. Not the "virtually anywhere" situation we have in KSP. I was unaware the landing strip was actually a mesh, so my comments about making it rough I guess don't apply :/ . I think that all the worlds need a change in terrain such that landing anything horizontally is nearly impossible except on landing strips... perhaps the new system in 1.1 can look at pressure on wheels, and have a cutoff, put balloon tires on your craft, and maybe it can land rough field. I would also like to see craters (and bumps for places that craters would be odd on) on the scale size of a lander. Maybe at scatter density, but you hit them, and you tip/crash. This would make landing less trivial. Yeah, I'm fine with some areas being things like salt flats. On worlds other than kerbin... not so much. I'd be fine if they were random, then the player would have to discover them, but generally speaking, you'd not land a fragile spaceplane in the dirt on some other world unless it had VTOL capability.

Yeah, I know, but O2 is not intelligence. If we're talking about the Fermi paradox, detecting such worlds without making an intelligent life determination merely increases the paradox (now we have a word of likely life... but no aliens walking around stealing trashcans (as I recall, that was the cartoon they were discussing up at LANL). Your point about directed broadcasts seems to mirror mine. With narrow lobes, the number of hours any such a society could spend broadcasting at any particular distant star is very small---and that means it's wasted effort as the potential recipients would have to be looking just for the few hours when the signal arrives. The combination of the 2 points would be to look at, and broadcast to, planets with O2 selectively, I suppose. Then you can dwell on them longer in transmission since there are far fewer. Still chances are that we could easily miss the call. If you dial random phone numbers (land lines only), and let it ring twice then hang up, you're vastly more likely to have a person answer than a SETI call even though many people will be at work when you call

Yeah, making off-runway landing suitably suicidal (it's not just flatness, but rocks, holes, mud, any number of hazards on the scale size of a wheel, particularly off kerbin) should come along with adding airports all around kerbin.

For my small kids and a Venus transit, I took the eyepiece off the Newtonian, and projected the sun on a wall so it was about 1m in diameter, then let them watch it on the wall. It helps that I have a room where the ceiling is nearly 50% glass.

The terrain need not be physically bumpy. The surface of every single planet in the Kerbol system needs whatever the "terrain" values are of the level 1 runway (or in fact worse than that). If it's not paved, there should be no spaceplane on it (unless the gear are then broken completely off). What defines the bumpiness of the runway? What is the same setting for terrain?

It need not be meshed rough, make sure the texture is a little better, and have the value be rough.

Yeah, coop is so far the only mode that makes even a little sense to me---the host would entirely control time warp, and hence it all moves in lockstep.

Obviously if you can do generation ships, then you don't need a planet (just as for colonies you don't need Mars, just build a habitat that spins), build Rama, lol. That said, if you want a planet, and habitable planets are indeed very, very rare, then that expands on the Dark Forest's premise. He doesn't mention that specifically, instead saying life is common, and expands indefinitely, but real estate is finite. In reality, life can be fairly uncommon, but good real estate is more rare still, hence don't stick your head up.

Another option is a way to have your single-player game occasionally have other players involved, even if not in real time. For example, what if there were a "Space Race" mode where your program is possibly used as the foil for another player's program, and you never even know it. Their game has the "opposing" program modeled after yours, and when it gets to some milestone, say a certain array of the tech tree unlocked, it takes a craft you made at that point, and uses it. Obviously time would have to be in the game somehow as well.

I don't disagree, actually. I'm not saying we're likely to detect such life, I'm saying that it's likely out there, even if we won't, or can't ever detect it. That said, my 400k number was predicated on life being a million times less likely than in our solar system (utterly arbitrary with no data at all). I think the paradox is very sensitive to initial assumptions. Also, you are right that the window of time when we could communicate is short, and that's on top of the discussion about how much time they could beam a signal to any particular place in the galaxy, so even if they were trying hard to contact others, those others would have to be: 1. In the timeframe of their history where they could look, and were looking. 2. Happened to be looking at the broadcaster at just the right time (likely infinitesimally small compared to even #1) to notice the transmission. So even if my 1M times less likely was made a few orders of magnitude more likely, the chance of contact would be tiny, possibly infinitesimal.

Yeah, whatever you do to make a mesh for such a world, ideally it would be done in interactive passes, with some craters superimposed upon others.

How do you get 80%? Show your work.

This makes no sense whatsoever, and MCT doesn't even exist. On top of that, reuse is unlikely to reduce costs by more than a few % anyway. You entirely missed the point of my statement. I know nothing about your country's GDP, spending, etc. That is my point, along with the fact that you apparently have as little understanding of the US as I have of your country's spending priorities. You've demonstrated consistently that you don't actually understand how money is spend in US government. You are welcome to an opinion, but it's entirely detached from reality. It's not an attack, you don't live here, you don't "get it," any more than I "get" your country's priorities. BTW, 25X lower GDP is still as much as 2 good US States put together, and if your claims about spacex pricing are correct, that's totally doable. The public school system in the city of NY spends 27 billion a year. I bet you guys could pony up a few billions. A bunch of us here, myself included, are excited about the current private space race. Some are delusional fanbois, others are more rational about it. You consistently talk about spacex as if they are some sort of substitute for NASA, and that is simply not the case. In addition, if you think that Boeing, LockMart, et al, are going to somehow disappear due to their SpaceX masters... that's just not going to happen.

"Common" is relative. 9 planets, 3 of which (and as many moons) in the habitable zone and one has life. Forget the habitable zone, even. There are about 100 planets and moons of which maybe 20 are of a decent size in the solar system (barring more largish stuff out in the Kuiper belt). Only 1 has life. If life was a million times more rare than that 1%, we're still talking about 400,000 worlds with life in our galaxy. Of course even that life might be very simple indeed. I tend to think that intelligence is fairly rare, with just the right combination of circumstances available. Heck, we all owe our existence to a single collision between 2 cells at some point a couple billion years ago. Then, on top of that, we had the "reset" button hit a few times along the way... pretty amazing. The universe, OTOH, is vast. There are more galaxies in the universe than stars in our own, so even with just a few hundred thousand worlds with life in one, that makes thousands of trillions in the universe.

Yeah, and beamed transmissions are over short time intervals. Alines beam a signal towards Earth, and let's say there is enough beam-slop that they can cover the entire sky in about a year with a few hours broadcast in each solid-angle they broadcast into. If we are not looking at them during that few hours (plus the travel time of the signal, obviously) we don't see them. Now, you can take some optimistic value, and multiply by a few million possible worlds over the 3-400 billion in the galaxy, and maybe there are signals zipping past earth fairly frequently... then you need to know how often we survey the sky for those signals, and we can see what the chances are that SETI is looking the right direction when a signal happens to zip by. We're basically re-deriving the Drake equation. I tend to think that simple life is probably incredibly common, but multicellular life is relatively rare.

It's more spaceplane buffing. People land them all over, which should not be a thing. Spaceplane to Duna? It better have a lander, because any spaceplane that lands (other than VTOL) off a runway should be destroyed.

Nothing has changed at all. Commercial crew funds a few different companies (it has to). It is very limited. How about YOUR country buys MCT. I say they just do it! Should be easy to convince them, as it's such a good deal!

NASA would be involved deeply in the design of any martian spacecraft, period. It would not be in the hands of spacex, and pretty soon it would look exactly like every other DRA plan for mars, including cost. The idea that NASA just buys an MCT is fantasy. Even if such a thing existed (and it won't without funding), and we all agreed it was great, and even if NASA agreed it was great and wanted to buy it... they'd not be allowed to buy it. Many in NASA didn't want SLS/Orion. They got it anyway. NASA doesn't decide what they buy, Congress decides what they buy.

The fact that people use the grass tells us a lot about what needs to happen to planetary surfaces in general. All open ground should be worse than the level 1 runway, everywhere in the solar system. Maybe rovers would work better if this was the case. For all the work on the new wheels in 1.1, have they bothered to check this? If a large, delicate spaceplane can land anywhere but a surfaced runway, something is profoundly broken.

This contains zero meaningful content. Musk doesn't make anything without customers, he's not that rich. Without profit SpaceX closes. BO is another story in many ways (Bezos has much deeper pockets). That they use a NASA facility is meaningless. The contractors are doing the work. If SLS were replaced by some SpaceX design... they'd build it at the same NASA facility, or it wouldn't be a thing.

Sigh. I am aware of the fact that New Horizons will not cross the galaxy. I should have spelled out what I meant. For a probe with a velocity such that it moves 100,000 light years at about 20km/s. It's a thought experiment, not an orbital mechanics problem. The real dv required for such a probe is likely at least 10-20X greater (a few hundred km/s). The crossing time is still vast compared to the time humans have had radios. Obviously with orbital mechanics, this is not a thing, we're just ball parking crossing times, the actual dv required for such a journey would be substantially higher just to cross in a billion years, but I'm trying to get at viable probe velocities that are not decent fraction of c as a boundary value. Ie: imagine an extragalactic object that is hyperbolic to the milky way such that it takes 1 billion years to cross it.

The galactic crossing time for a probe like New Horizons is on the order of a billion years. Light is just 100,000 years. We've not been looking terribly long, and any sufficiently powerful signal from far away would necessarily be directional, which limits any civilization's ability to broadcast often to the same parts of the sky... so even if they were all trying, we'd have to be looking in their direction during the short timeframe when they were broadcasting in our direction. How long would you dwell on a given area if broadcasting, and what solid angle would you be broadcasting into? Communications in this way is non-trivial.

Unless everyone is in time lockstep, 100% of the time, it's pretty goofy, IMHO. I'm not even slightly interested in MP. Yes, I know how DMP does it, it's probably the best solution in a situation where the best solution is still bad. Hopefully anyone at Squad working on MP is not a person who would otherwise do something the game could actually use, like more details terrains, etc.